The Headhunter: Understanding associate attrition, and what to do about it | Warren Smith

I was recently speaking with the managing partner for one of the major firms in our market on some recent attrition challenges the firm was working through, which inevitably led to the question of what constitutes “normal” attrition for a law firm.

While individual firms may have slightly different patterns by year, in Canada, markets tend to see an aggregate lawyer attrition of 10-15 per cent annually. While the majority of this attrition tends to be the result of associate turnover, there have been some select...